Re: How do I get rid of the SPAM Popup Ad for an External HDD

Yeah, I first noticed this obscenity during a presentation to a prospective client. Mark's apologized and everything, but, I mean... WHAT COULD YOU PEOPLE HAVE BEEN THINKING???

I love my SL410, and it works great. I had disabled MCP at first because it seemed ... creepy. But then, I succumbed to it's FUD about how I needed it to get important info from Lenovo about my brand new, business-critical laptop.

And then it pants'ed me in front of my partners and a prospective client. We lost the client; maybe we would've anyway, who knows. Lenovo, I'm pretty sure, lost the chance to sell a laptop to anybody else in that room.

So, you made a sucker out of me. I'll have a hard time forgetting that.

I deactivated "Online Support". That seems to have stopped it. Except that the "ThinkVantage Toolbox" now won't start up without asking for it to be turned back on. Still, that's better than surprise pop-up spamverts during a client presentation. I recommend that anyone unfortunate enough to have this "feature" does the same. You should probably consider the cost of a "clean" Windows distribution to replace the Lenovo OEM spamvertbot when considering future laptop purchases.

I picked up my machine to run audio editing and DJ software. I heard Lenovo's were built well and prefer the matte black look and appreciate the value vs an apple product, which is more commonly used for this purpose.

However, it was a mistake.

I can't run audio from a machine with random noisy pop-ups ruining my tracks and I'm not enough of a computer whiz to figure out how to remove them. My ASIO driver setup won't "stick" as well, but that could be an MS issue.

Re: HOW to use Message Center Plus???

My wife and I have relatively new Lenovos. I have the newer machine (about a year old) and my wife's is around 2 years old. I have not seen any of the Lenovo ads on mine, but about 2 weeks ago, my wife started getting them. I am familiar with advertising malware, but even though they are always Lenovo adds on my wife's machine, I assumed that they were being generated by adware/malware that had nothing to do with Lenovo (because it would have been a collosally bad decision on Lenovo's part to be the culprit), so reading this thread has been quite a rude awakening.

Anyway, her machine does not have MCP installed (maybe it is named something else now) so I am hoping that someone with a newer Lenovo will read this post and tell me how to stop the ads on my wife's machine. No need to ask me any newbie type of computer questions - I've been a programmer for 25 years and know how to setup PCs, networks, chase down issues etc etc.. just trying to not have to spend the unknown amount of time figuring it out on my own. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Re: HOW to use Message Center Plus???

Sadly, you're being an optimist to think that an official support person is going to reply.

Here's what I'd do: WIth the unwanted ad visible on the screen, open the Task Manager (Ctrl-Shift-Esc) and find the window on the Applications tab. Right-click it and choose Go To Process. Now you know the name of the unwanted executable; if it's not a system file like RUNDLL32, you're in business. Search for the executable, and that should lead you the folder where the program is installed... which quite possibly has the same name as the program you need to uninstall.

Of course, you do all this at your own risk, etc. I'm not an "official" support person, after all. Just a guy who does this for a living...

Re: Microsoft now classes MCP as ADWARE

Does anyone have suggestions on how to get rid of the adware? I deleted the destination file but I need to clean out the registry since the computer still trys to find the adware. This is my last Lenovo....what a joke!